HACKER Q&A
📣 garrrikkotua

Data Catalog with SQL-To-Text. Will it help business users?


Hi there, my name is Igor.

I am testing different ideas in data governance space.

Sometimes business users have problems with data trust - a dashboard looks strange and they don't know whether it's a technical problem or a business one. They want to understand, how particular metric is calculated. Usually, these metrics are calculated via SQL, so I think SQL-To-Text might be usefull here to automatically generate descriptions and explanations for dashboards, reports, etc.

Do you think it's a big and important problem which is worth solving? Will natural language processing (SQL-To-Text) really help here?

Any thought are welcome :)

  👤 coolgeek Accepted Answer ✓
Explainability is always helpful :)

Simple SQL statements are pretty well self-documenting.

Where things get hard to explain is in:

  * complicated JOINs
  * queries that select from views, derived tables, CTEs, etc
  * poorly named objects (tables, columns)
  * dynamically constructed queries (e.g. really ugly WHERE clauses generated in a web app)
  * queries generated by ORMs
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are several other sources of pain.

The other big question is - why do you want to devote your time and effort to it? I don't want to discourage you. But I don't see any real path to a marketable product here, particularly not as a standalone product.